Plex bridges the gap between your Mac and your home theater, doing so with a visually appealing user interface that provides instant access to your media. Plex can play a wide range of video, audio and photo formats as well as online streaming audio and video. The real power of Plex is found in its library features: Organize your media into versatile libraries, automatically retrieve metadata from the Internet, and display your libraries using one of the visually stunning skins.

New in 0.5.22: "You can now configure the way the H.264 decoder does deblocking. Some of you will know this is the âskiploopfilterâ setting in ffmpeg. (...) Iâve found that if you configure it to skip all deblocking, the âkillaâ bird sample uses about 20% less CPU and plays at a higher frame rate. Bottom line: your mileage may vary, but it may help you with hard-to-play content."

Plex and Boxee have a lot in common, and Boxee is ready to use right after installation, practically, but I'm choosing Plex for now. Because: 1) Plex can use iTunes' Jelly and Styx visualizations, 2) Plex doesn't broadcast each and every thing you watch or listen to, which sort of creeps me out, 3) I can't figure out how to make Boxee as stunningly attractive as Plex.

I agree with endekks - I wasn't really expecting all that much from Plex, especially given my frustration with Boxee's menu navigation and (IMHO) its terribly cluttered UI, but I've been thoroughly impressed by Plex so far. Bravo guys.

In response to rufasevach: As a user of both Boxee and Plex, I can say that while Boxee may have some promise, Plex not only has promise but actually performs better for me now and has a great deal of features I find useful now. There is no question that Boxee seems to be a little easier to set up and get going than Plex, but I still find that Plex has more going for it at the moment.

Library updating could be a bit more reliable and a few UI issues cause some annoyances here and there, but for the most part I have switched to Plex as my primary HTPC option for my Mac Mini connected to my Bravia.

Requests: More regions. I live in Japan and would like to see it as an option. In-app key configuration. The forums and FAQ on the site proved useful for figuring out how to edit the XML file to get my dinovo Mini working properly (no escape key!) and doing it in the programme itself would have been far more useful.Butter dispenser for my popcorn. I spend enough time watching stuff through this app now, so why not? ___

It's incredible the amount of effort the development team is putting on porting XBMC. Plex, as today, is fast and completely usable. Anyone who knows what XBMC is, knows it's way ahead from every other media center software. And Plex is now in that position as well. You must try it now (and forget FrontRow).

Reading the below comments one might suspect Plex is in a lot worse state than it actually is. Crashes are less frequent, playback is smooth as ever and the GUI is now a lot nicer than the screenshot shown here. Do try a recent Plex and be prepared for a surprise!